There are lots of tricks and techniques that farmers can use to end up with great corn yields and returns.
However, taking advantage of them might mean learning some new things and ignoring local naysayers, says agronomy broadcaster Brian Hefty of Ag PhD.
“Most farmers across North America are not using the technology they’ve already got,” Hefty told the CropConnect conference Feb. 18.
He said farmers often use methods and technologies incorrectly, causing small losses across a wide spectrum of production factors.
Those include poor use of glypho-sate, poor fertilizer use and poor variety selection.
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Hefty said few farmers bother to vary their seeding rate within a field, even if they know that some of the land is poor and some is rich.
“We’ve talked about variable rate fertilizer for years, but now that I can change the planting population, too, this is a big deal,” said Hefty. “I cut back. In some cases it’s drastic.”
He said he has patches in one of his fields that he seeds at 33,000 seeds per acre, while other areas receive 29,000 seeds per acre and poor sections receive 26,000 seeds.
“That saves an awful lot of money, and there’s no point putting all that out there,” said Hefty.
“If you want to do it, it’s pretty simple.… A lot of the new planters have the technology already.”
Hefty advised farmers to try many different ideas and methods for pushing yields on different parts of their farm just to see how they work out.
He said farmers need to be building soil, tiling wet fields, planting new seed varieties and doing good pest management to get the best yields.
However, they’re unlikely to try a lot of these unconventional methods and ideas if they don’t believe there’s much to be gained.
The farmer who wants to get well beyond average yields and returns needs to be able to resist critics, he added.
“People are trying to drag you down all the time. Are you going to listen to them, or not?” said Hefty.
